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Although I write a blog that centers people of color in exploring the connections between the medical system and race – an activity that has always been fundamentally personal – I rarely discuss how it personally affects me.

The occasions in which I have, were driven by my need to make sense of Trayvon and Walter, Tamir and Freddie and to reconcile their lives with how I move in my life, as a black physician. But there is no sense to be made of state-sanctioned murder and each time I left the task weary with emotion.

I used those emotions to power 6 months of writing and editing my first submission to Pediatrics, the most important academic journal in my field, on police violence; both begging and demanding this type of violence be considered a devastating threat to public health and safety for children of color. The first comment my co-authors (also black women) and I were asked to address was what the editors called our “anger” and the last was to “say something nice about the police.”

Here I was, asking to be seen; asking for black children and families to be seen; but having to respond to why I don’t see police and why what a white man perceives as my emotion, is a problem to be addressed, in writing. My emotion. That they named anger.

To be labeled angry and asked to publicly disavow said emotion for professional legitimacy was nothing new, for me, my co-authors, or centuries of black women accosted by the limited public characterizations of our person-hood. But when they named my emotions anger, did they also name my tears? Did they name the deep humiliation I processed to explain, to a pediatric medical journal, why the deaths of black parents and children should be a priority?

Did they furiously, nauseatingly, mind-numbingly, cry over the public executions of their people? Did they choke and swallow those emotions back everyday just to function as a productive adult in the world? Did they wake to bury the devastation that allows them to hold academic conversations about the threats, challenges, and disparities that may amount to the extinction of their people?

In medicine, if we talk about racism at all, we talk about how it is unfair – but no ones fault really. Short of bias training that validates a generalized lack of explicit accountability – we primarily do nothing. It is as if medicine thinks the solution to centuries of systematic racism and racial inequality that continues to poison black bodies, young and old alike – through public divestment, disease and varying degrees of despondency – is self-reflection.

But it is killing us.

Racism. Is. Killing. Black. People.

Sometimes I feel the poison in me. Squeezing my chest in anxiety, fear, or fury as I navigate the complex terrain of my public female black-ness, trying to wear my emotional and intellectual complexity in a way that at best, allows me to be seen but at least, prevents me from being dismissed altogether. The daily work of avoiding the silencing that accompanies being mistaken as simply an “angry black female” while also finding safe spaces to be a black female who can hold anger and the emotional complexity inherent to full humanity – is an extra job, that I do, at my regular job and on vacation.

Sometimes I see the poison in my family, as they do the work of making space for their whole self in a world that can easily, effortlessly limit them to an assumed identity. I watch them negotiating other people’s comfort in an exhausting performance of excellence and I understand the raw pain blackness chafes on their humanity.

Racism excludes black people from public goods and private sympathies. It is the root cause of health disparities, the education gap, the wealth gap, the gender wage gap for black women, and the unconscionable incidence of institutional violence against black bodies.

And in so much that medicine ignores that root cause, it is and will remain complicit in the maintenance of institutional racism, both inside our walls and out.

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Black History Month is probably one of the most underutilized opportunities to re-ignite the national conversation around social justice in America. As it is typically celebrated, like a random recollection of various contributions by “notable” African-Americans, it feels more like a stale tradition on the verge of irrelevance, than the opportunity to engage issues of racism and social inequality as historical American values that continue to define modern American life.

Last year, I shared why Black History Month remains an essential moment to nationally recognize the lives and works of African-Americans. Right? The original #BlackLivesMatters movement started in 1926.

This year, I want to flesh out examples of how historical American values around race continue to inform national issues and particularly examine how those issues impact health. I’ve talked about mass incarceration, gun violence, and gender inequality a bit in the past.

This month, I’m going to take on the industry of poverty, and child poverty in particular, and how national, state, and local public policy may engineer disadvantage in ways that have profound impacts on health. I also want to talk health systems transformation and consider new models for healthcare delivery that may uniquely serve low-income, communities of color.

And lastly, I want to speak openly and honestly about my dismay with the medical community and our lack of public acknowledgement of the deaths of Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and the other recent victims of police brutality. Lest, we begin to believe that police are the only modern manifestation of our nation’s tragic history with race, I am going to talk about institutional racism and how physician bias directly impacts the health of communities of color, threatening their lives in quantifiable ways.

We are never farther than our willingness to look at where we’ve been allows us to be. In our plight for justice, to move forward, we have to understand where we’ve come from. In February, we are sitting in a powerful moment to look honestly at our nation’s troubled history with race and inequality and find clarity around the pressing issues of our time. Join me this month in discussing how those issues impact our health!

And if there are topics you’d like to talk about, join the conversation and leave a comment below.

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Graduation!June 30th, 2013

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The opinions stated here only reflect mine and are not representative of any of the institutions I have attended or currently attend. Also, although I am a licensed physician, any generalized opinions I offer are not meant as medical advice to treat or advise patients. Medical decisions can only safely be made in consultation with a doctor you know and trust. Also, links to other websites do not imply that I endorse any of the views expressed there or products advertised there.